The Greater Crusade
The following is an excerpt from my latest book, After Christendom (Sophia, 2023). If you’d like to support my work, I’d be grateful if you would consider purchasing a copy.
In Islam, they speak of two jihads, or holy wars: the greater and the lesser. The lesser jihad is the one we in the West are familiar with. It’s the violence, the collective struggle for dominance over all mankind, the subjugation of the whole world by and to the ummah. The greater jihad, however, is by man against himself.
Islam, we know, means “submission,” and a Muslim’s first priority is to force himself to submit to Allah. Crucially, the lesser jihad can be waged only by those who complete the greater.
There is no equivalent to a lesser jihad in Christianity. The nearest we come is the Crusades, but they were not integral to the Faith. On the contrary, the spirit of the Crusades would have been alien to the Fathers, to the Apostles, and to Christ Himself.
In the First Book of Kingdoms, the Israelites are fighting (and losing) a war against the Philistines. They call upon God to “establish a king for us to judge us like all the other nations.” God is displeased. Since the Lord led the Israelites out of Egypt, they had been ruled directly by God. Israel was a literal theocracy. “They have rejected me,” God laments to the Prophet Samuel, “to bring to naught my reign over them.”
Samuel warns them that, in time, they will come to regret their decision: “Then in that day you will cry out before your king whom you chose for yourselves, and the Lord will not hear you in those days, because you chose a king for yourselves.” Still, they cry: “Then we will be like all the other nations,” they say, “and our king will judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”
Samuel is distraught. “You have done great wickedness before the Lord in asking a king for yourselves,” he warns. Still, God grants their request. He elects a man named Saul to serve as Israel’s very first king, and he quickly begins fighting Israel’s battles for them.
Incidentally, the Philistines had destroyed every blacksmith in Israel; the army had to confiscate every plowshare in the land and forge them into armor and weapons.
Now, fast-forward to the year A.D. 30. The Pharisees are waiting for God’s anointed to restore the Kingdom of Israel, drive out the Romans, and lead them to global domination. They know the Scriptures so well, yet they can’t see how deeply God abhors this desire to rule and fight, to dominate and subjugate. They ask Jesus when He, the alleged Messiah, plans to restore Israel. But Jesus turns their question on its head. “The Kingdom of God is within you,” He tells them.
Christ has not come to restore the monarchy. He has come to restore theocracy. Once again, God will rule His people directly.
This time, however, He will not reign over them. He will reign within them. This is the Man of whom Isaiah spoke: the Word of God, who shall judge all nations. At His coming, God’s people will beat their swords back into plowshares; “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, / Neither shall they learn war anymore.”
The kingdoms of men know only tyranny and strife. The Kingdom of God is freedom and peace. And yet “the kingdom of heaven suffers violence,” Jesus warns, “and the violent take it by force.” This violence is the war each of us must wage against our passions, our appetites, our sins, our own rebellious instincts, our satanic pride, to enthrone Christ within our hearts. This is something very much like the greater jihad.
It is, so to speak, the greater crusade.
Christ also says, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” There is an impossible paradox at the bottom of our premise here. The only way Christians can ever rule the world is if we stop trying.
Now, here’s the million-dollar question: Do you believe Jesus’s promise? Do you trust Him to give you the whole world, if only you give Him yourself? Do I?
And do we believe His promise that the meek shall inherit the earth? When you witness some grave injustice in the world — when the president signs an evil bill into law, or when innocent lives are lost in terrorist attack, or when a foreign leader slaughters his own people, or when one foreign country invades another — is your first response to become meeker?
Why do you think God said it was the meek who would inherit the world rather than the poor in spirit or the pure of heart? Because only the meek give God the opportunity to work through them. That’s all “meekness” is. I think Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, of blessed memory, put it best:
You remember how you were taught to write when you were small. Your mother put a pencil in your hand, took your hand in hers and began to move it. Since you did not know at all what she meant to do, you left your hand completely free in hers. This is what I mean by the power of God being manifest in weakness.
You could think of that also in the terms of a sail. A sail can catch the wind and be used to maneuver a boat only because it is so frail. If instead of a sail you put a solid board, it would not work; it is the weakness of the sail that makes it sensitive to the wind.
The same is true of the gauntlet and the surgical glove. How strong is the gauntlet, how frail is the glove, yet in intelligent hands it can work miracles because it is so frail.
We can’t help God achieve His plan for salvation any more than a hammer helps the carpenter to build a house. The most we can do is allow Him to work with us, through us. And the more resigned we become to His will, the “weaker” we become, the more deeply and fundamentally we are united to Him. This is what it means to be the Body of Christ.
Of course, the acquisition of holy weakness (or meekness) is the work of a lifetime. It requires us to cultivate and maintain inner peace. And so much of what we consider “practical” is, in fact, totally counterproductive, if only because it robs us of this inner peace.
Again, without peace, a man can never be meek, and without meekness he cannot inherit the earth. That is why Saint Nikodemos urges us to guard our inner peace at all costs. “Watch yourself with all diligence,” he writes, “lest the enemy rob you, depriving you of this great treasure, which is inner peace and stillness of soul. The enemy strives to destroy the peace of the soul, because he knows that when the soul is in turmoil it is more easily led to evil. You must guard your peace.”
This is where our journey together ends. There’s nothing I as a journalist can do but point you beyond the world of journalism, current events, and politics (including, or especially, “Church politics”). Believe me, I’ve followed this road as far as it could take me, and it’s a dead end. That world has nothing to offer you or anyone else.
Ultimately, the answers are not to be found in men like me or books like this. They’re in Scripture and the Fathers. They’re in the Divine Liturgy, or the Holy Mass, or whatever you prefer to call it. They’re within you, dear reader. Remember what Saint Paul says: “You are an epistle of Christ”—yes, you—“written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart.”
Do you see how it always comes back to the heart?
You may have noticed that I haven’t really addressed the question of why Christendom fell in the first place. I was hoping we could avoid that topic altogether, but I don’t think that’s possible.
To put it briefly, I agree with Philip Sherrard: that, “if we live in a post Christian epic, this is not primarily because from somewhere toward the end of the seventeenth century we have deserted our Christian society. It may be because in creating and seeking to preserve the society we have sacrificed, or neglected, the essential character of Christianity itself.”
This is the answer I’ve hinted at throughout the book, but let’s state it now very clearly: God no longer reigns in the Western world because Western man drove Him from our hearts. We can’t blame Islamists or Communists. Christendom committed suicide.
God is calling us to conversion. This is what the Master meantwhen He said, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” He didn’t mean, “Repent, because the Apocalypse is coming soon.” He wasn’t threatening us. He was telling us the Gospel, the euangelion, the Good News.
The Jews wanted a worldly kingdom, free from the oppression of the Romans. But their Messiah offered something much greater: freedom from passion, the forgiveness of sins, and the friendship of God.
His message for us today is exactly the same: The thing for which you long is close by you. It is imminent. It is within your very heart. All you have to do is repent. Give up your petty trinkets; they are worthless. I’ll give you instead the Pearl of Great Price. Take off your rags and put on the wedding garment. Put not your trust in princes, for human salvation is emptiness. Instead, put your trust in Me.
We do not believe these promises because we are unconverted.
We may call ourselves Christians, or go to church every Sunday, or wear a cross around our neck. None of it matters if we don’t trust in Jesus’s promises and live by His commandments. The Master warned us: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Please, dear reader, do not be offended. But let’s not deceive ourselves in our pride either. Remember how certain Peter was in his own faith . . . until he stepped outside the boat and began to sink. Remember how he insisted that he would never betray the Lord . . . until he did, three times. Even at the very end of his life, he tried to escape martyrdom by fleeing Rome; only when Christ met him on the Appian Way, carrying His cross, did he turn back and face his own death.
Peter betrayed Christ no less than Judas did. The only difference between them was repentance. Peter was a sinner, but Judas was a hypocrite. We all sin, whether we want to or not; but we are hypocrites only by choice. And this is all I hoped to say in this book.
Forget the “lesser crusade,” the sin of the Pharisees. Embrace the greater crusade. Wage holy war against your own passions, your desires, your anxieties, and above all your doubts. The only Christendom that matters is within you. Don’t pine for a king when God reigns within you. “Commune with your own heart,” and there enthrone Christ. Repent, and believe the Good News: You are Christendom. Your heart is the only kingdom God desires. Go now and meet your King.
Come, O Lord.
Exactly the message I needed this morning.
Great encouragement for these dark times. I look forward to reading the entire book.